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Tag Archives: TECH

What Big Tech and Big Tobacco research funding have in common

December 13, 2020   Big Data
 What Big Tech and Big Tobacco research funding have in common

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Amid declining sales and evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, in the 1950s tobacco companies undertook PR campaigns to reinvent themselves as socially responsible and to shape public opinions. They also started funding research into the relationship between health and tobacco. Now, Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google are following the same playbook to fund AI ethics research in academia, according to a recently published paper by University of Toronto Center for Ethics PhD student Mohamed Abdalla and Harvard Medical School student Moustafa Abdalla.

The coauthors conclude that effective solutions to the problem will need to come from institutional or governmental policy changes. The Abdalla brothers argue Big Tech companies aren’t just involved with, but are leading, ethics discussions in academic settings.

“The truly damning evidence of Big Tobacco’s behavior only came to light after years of litigation. However, the parallels between the public facing history of Big Tobacco’s behavior and the current behavior of Big Tech should be a cause for concern,” the paper reads. “We believe that it is vital, particularly for universities and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place.”

An analysis of tenure-track research faculty at major AI research MIT, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto included in the report found that nearly 60% with known funding sources have taken money from Big Tech.

Last week, Google fired Timnit Gebru, an AI ethics researcher, in what Google employees described as a “a retaliatory fire” following “unprecedented research censorship.” In an interview with VentureBeat earlier this week, Gebru said AI research conferences are heavily influenced by industry and said the world needs better options for AI research funding than corporate and military funding.

The Grey Hoodie project name is meant to hark back to Project Whitecoat, a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the impact of second-hand smoke that started in the 1980s. The Partnership on AI (PAI), the coauthors argue, takes the role of the Council for Tobacco Research, a group that supplied funding to academics studying the impact of smoking on human health. Created in 2016 by Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, PAI now has more than 100 participating organizations, including the ACLU and Amnesty International. By participating in meetings, research, and other initiatives, coauthors argue that nonprofit and human rights groups end up legitimizing Big Tech companies.

In a December 2019 account published in The Intercept, MIT PhD student Rodrigo Ochigame called AI ethics initiatives from Silicon Valley “strategic lobbying efforts” and quoted an MIT Media Lab colleague as saying “Neither ACLU nor MIT nor any non-profit has any power in PAI.”

Earlier this year the digital human rights organization Access Now resigned from the Partnership on AI, in part because the coalition has been ineffective in influencing the behavior of corporate partners. In an interview with VentureBeat responding to questions about ethics washing, PAI director Terah Lyons said it takes time to change the behavior of Big Tech companies.

In addition to funding academic research, Big Tech companies also fund AI research conferences. For example, coauthors say the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference has never had a year without Big Tech funding, and NeurIPS has had at least two Big Tech sponsors since 2015. Apple, Amazon Science, Facebook AI Research, and Google Research are all among platinum sponsors of NeurIPS this year.

Abdalla and Abdalla suggest academic researchers consider splintering AI ethics into a separate field from computer science, akin to the way bioethics is separated from medicine and biology.

The Grey Hoodie Project follows analysis released this fall about the de-democratization of AI and a compute divide forming between Big Tech, elite universities, and the rest of the world. The Grey Hoodie Project paper was initially published this fall but was accepted for publication by the Resistance AI workshop, which takes place Friday as part of the NeurIPS AI research conference, the largest annual gathering of AI researchers in the world. In another first, this year, NeurIPS authors were required to state financial conflicts of interest and potential impact to society.

The topic of corporate influence over academic research came up at NeurIPS on Friday morning. During a panel conversation, Black in AI cofounder Rediet Abebe said she will refuse to take funding from Google, and that more senior faculty in academia need to speak up. Next year, Abebe will become the first Black woman assistant professor ever in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department at UC Berkeley.

“Maybe a single person can do a good job separating out funding sources from what they’re doing, but you have to admit that in aggregate there’s going to be an influence. If a bunch of us are taking money from the same source, there’s going to be a communal shift towards work that is serving that funding institution,” she said.

The Resistance AI workshop at NeurIPS explores how AI has shifted power into the hands of governments and corporations and away from marginalized communities and how to shift power back to the people. Organizers count among them the founders of groups like Disability in AI and Queer in AI. Workshop organizers also include members of the AI community who describe themselves as abolitionists, advocates, ethicists, and AI policy experts, such as J Khadijah Abdurahman, who this week this week penned a piece about the moral collapse of AI ethics, and Marie-Therese Png, who coauthored a paper earlier this year about anticolonial AI and how to make AI free of the exploitative or oppressive technology.

A statement from Google Brain research associate Raphael Lopes and other conference organizers said the Resistance AI group was formed following a meetup at an AI conference this summer and is designed to include people marginalized in society today.

“We were frustrated with the limitations of ‘AI for good’ and how it could be coopted as a form of ethics-washing,” organizers said. “In some ways, we still have a long way to go: many of us are adjacent to big tech and academia, and we want to do better at engaging those who don’t have this kind of institutional power.”

Other work presented today as part of the event includes the following:

  • “AI at the Borderlands” explores surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • In a paper VentureBeat has written about, Alex Hanna and Tina Park urged tech companies to think beyond scale in order to properly address societal issues.
  • “Does Deep Learning Have Politics?” asserts that a shift toward deep learning and increasingly large datasets “centers the power of these algorithms in corporations or the government, which thus leaves its practice vulnerable to the institutional racism and sexism that is so often found there.”
  • A paper analyzing research submitted to major conferences found that building on recent work, performance, accuracy, and understanding are among the top values reflected in machine learning research.

On Saturday another NeurIPS workshop will examine harm caused by AI and the broader impact of AI research on society.

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Bionic raises $17 million for tech that automates app analytics

December 10, 2020   Big Data
 Bionic raises $17 million for tech that automates app analytics

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App analytics startup Bionic today emerged from stealth with $ 17 million, a combination of series A and seed funding. The Palo Alto, California-based company plans to put the funds toward investing in R&D as it expands its client base internationally.

MarketandMarkets forecasts that the app analytics market will grow from $ 1.05 billion in 2018 to $ 2.85 billion by 2023. Among the factors driving growth are the demand for apps and an influx of mobile advertising. Because ads are a critical source of mobile app revenue, it’s increasingly important that bugs don’t interfere with their placement. In 2019, there were more than 204 billion app downloads, a roughly 6% increase on the year before. And by one estimate, mobile advertising represented 72% of all U.S. digital ad spending in 2019.

Bionic was cofounded by CEO Idan Ninyo and CTO Eyal Mamo, who spent over five years in Unit 8200, the Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israel Defense Forces responsible for collecting intelligence and code decryption. Ninyo’s plans to relocate to the U.S. were disrupted by the pandemic, forcing him and Mamo to conduct Bionic’s series A round remotely.

Bionic’s platform reverse-engineers apps to create architectural and data flow breakdowns. It monitors core changes in production, enabling developers to define guardrails that prevent app updates and upgrades from negatively impacting performance. Bionic is agentless and ostensibly works across environments, locations, and infrastructures, from on-premises apps to hosted cloud-native microservices. (Microservice architectures arrange apps as collections of related services.) Moreover, the process is automated and can be deployed in what Bionic claims amounts to minutes.

“We are using many of the reverse engineering techniques we leveraged in Unit 8200 to deliver an automated and comprehensive inventory of customers’ applications: where they are deployed, configurations, APIs, data sources, changes, and more,” Ninyo told VentureBeat via email. “In minutes, we are delivering what used to take hundreds, even thousands of hours to compile across systems, spreadsheets, and other manual collection methods. We are able to show the full applicative dependency and dataflow map of the production environment, how different services consume APIs, what data is flowing between services, and data sources.”

Bionic competes with a number of app analytics startups, among them Apptopia and Adjust. But the company says its tools have experienced a rapid uptake in adoption and are already being used by IT, operations, and security teams at pharmaceutical, financial service, and technology companies.

“The pandemic accelerated digital transformation efforts across almost all organizations, especially since employees are working from home and enterprises are becoming more reliant on their digital offerings,” Ninyo continued. “That has made the issue of application chaos ever more acute for enterprise IT teams. All these organizations realize that they must maintain compliance, reduce risk, and improve resiliency without slowing down the rate of development.”

Bionic’s series A round was led by Battery Ventures investors Dharmesh Thakker and René Bonvanie. Additional investors include former Goldman Sachs CTO Don Duet, former Barclays CIO Sameer Jain, and Ariel Maislos. The company currently has 20 employees.

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AI Weekly: Tech, power, and building the Biden administration

November 14, 2020   Big Data
 AI Weekly: Tech, power, and building the Biden administration

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After the defeat of Donald Trump, there was little time between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ celebratory speeches and the start of conversations about transition team members and key administration appointments.

Some of the first names to emerge include people with tech backgrounds like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who may be tapped to lead a tech industry panel in the White House. Since leaving Google, Schmidt extended his services to the Pentagon especially for machine learning. He also acted as head of the Defense Innovation Board at the Pentagon, and the National Security Commission on AI, a group advising Congress that more federal spending is needed to compete with China. NSCAI commissioners have so far recommended things like the creation of a government-run AI university and increasing public-private partnership in the semiconductor industry.

Hearing names like Schmidt and others raised questions about how close the administration will get with Big Tech at a time when tech companies are gaining reputations as the next Big Tobacco. Unlike when Biden first entered the White House in 2009, a number of sources today say Big Tech’s concentration of power is an accelerant of inequality.

A Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against Google and a congressional committee investigation both found that Big Tech companies enjoy an edge based on compute, machine learning, access to large amounts of personal data, and wealth. The congressional report also concludes that Big Tech poses a threat to competitive free market economy but also democracy.

A paper covered by VentureBeat this week found that a compute divide is driving inequality in AI research, concentrating power, and giving an advantage to universities and Big Tech companies in the age of deep learning. The Biden campaign platform committed to increases in federal research and development spending in areas like AI and 5G up to $ 300 billion, spending that could help address that inequality as well as projects identified by groups like the NSCAI.

The Obama-Biden administration developed a reputation for bringing new concepts into the White House like appointment of a chief technology officer and chief data scientist, support for open access to data, and championing public service by people with tech skills, but that all seems like a long time ago.

Speaking to changing attitudes since then, Tim Wu, who testified as part of a congressional antitrust investigation into Congress, told the Financial Times “There has been a shift since the Obama administration, even among the people working in that administration, in the way they think about power in the tech world.”

Despite those changes, work to build civic tech that improves lives remains undone, said Nicole Wong, who served as deputy White House CTO. She entered the role shortly after the Edward Snowden leaks went public in 2014 and was responsible for privacy, internet, and innovation policy. She was also part of legal teams at Google and Twitter. Wong is now serving on a Biden review team for the National Security Council, according to Reuters.

In a speech delivered about a year ago at Aspen Tech Policy Hub in San Francisco, she said the government has outdated and inefficient tech, and that there’s a pipeline problem for people with tech skills who want to apply their talent to public service. Wong said she still believes that the government can make technology that improves human lives and that it’s important that it do so. Modernizing outdated government tech isn’t moonshot technology, she said, but public trust is at its lowest rate since the 1970s, a trend that started before Trump came into office. That pipeline issue is important because the decline in public trust is due in part to a failure to deliver for the people.

“That’s why the non-glamorous work of modernizing a 70-year-old system matters just as much or more as perfecting a self-driving car, or putting a person on Mars,” she said. “If we can order a gluten-free chocolate cake on our mobile phone while sitting in our living room and have it delivered in an hour then we should be able to help a single mother get food stamps without having to take a day off work and fill out paperwork and stand in line at a limited hours government office. We should be able to get our benefits to our veterans who fought for our country and the world that makes this tech possible.”

Some believe Biden plans to take on Big Tech companies like Facebook. Gene Kimmelman, who testified in favor of antitrust reform last year, will be part of the Department of Justice review team, for example. Others have concluded that initial appointments signal the opposite.

If you’re interested in seeing particulars about some of the tech connections, Protocol made an interactive graph that shows connections between acquaintances, family, and current and former employers. Who the Biden administration chooses may reflect its priorities, the diverse coalition that delivered the Biden ticket to the office, and may inspire people to the kind of public service that Wong talked about in order to solve moonshot problems and improve people’s lives. They can also reflect the shift in attitudes about Big Tech and power that Wu mentioned. The involvement of people like chief of staff Ron Klain seems to indicate they will at least believe in science.

In the days and weeks ahead, we will learn more about what the Biden cabinet and heads of federal agencies will look like. Building the Biden administration will have to take a lot of factors into account, from short term problems like a a global pandemic and urgent need for U.S. economic recovery, but also longer term issues like the decline in public trust in government, concentration of power by Big Tech, the continuing decline of democracy in our time, and the increase of surveillance and autocratic rule at a time of accelerating deployments of AI in business and government.

For AI coverage, send news tips to Khari Johnson, Kyle Wiggers, and Seth Colaner — and be sure to subscribe to the AI Weekly newsletter and bookmark our AI Channel.

Thanks for reading,

Khari Johnson

Senior AI Staff Writer


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AI researchers urge tech to go beyond scale to address systemic social issues

October 24, 2020   Big Data
 AI researchers urge tech to go beyond scale to address systemic social issues

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The definition of success for startups and Big Tech companies alike has long been summed up by three words: hockey stick growth. Speedy gains in terms of both users and revenue is the dream for any company looking to scale. But according to a paper recently published by Google senior research scientist Alex Hanna and independent researcher Tina Park, a growing number of AI researchers say companies interested in purpose beyond profit need to consider approaches beyond rapid growth.

The paper argues that scale thinking is not just a way to grow a business, but a method that impacts all parts of that business, actively inhibits participation in tech and society, and “forces particular types of participation to operate as extractive or exploitative labor.”

“Whether people are aware of it or not, scale thinking is all-encompassing. It is not just an attribute of one’s product, service, or company, but frames how one thinks about the world (what constitutes it and how it can be observed and measured), its problems (what is a problem worth solving versus not), and the possible technological fixes for those problems,” the paper reads.

The authors go on to say that companies rooted in scale thinking are unlikely to be as “effective at deep, systemic change as their purveyors imagine. Rather, solutions which resist scale thinking are necessary to undo the social structures which lie at the heart of social inequality.”

This kind of thinking runs counter to not only dogma at the heart of Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google, but also the way media and analysts typically assess the value of emerging startups.

Earlier this month, Congress released an antitrust investigation that found Big Tech companies rely on scale to maintain and strengthen monopolies across the digital economy. A Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit filed Tuesday against Google, the first against a major tech company in two decades, also points to the scale achieved through algorithms and collection of personal user data as a key factor in the government’s decision to sue the Alphabet company.

The opposition includes scale evangelists like Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, AWS CTO Werner Vogels, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is quoted in the DOJ lawsuit as saying “scale is the key” to Google’s strength in search.

Embedded in scale thinking, Hanna and Park argue, is the idea that scalability is morally good and solutions that cannot scale are morally impoverished. Authors say that’s part of why Big Tech companies place such a high value on artificial intelligence.

“Large tech firms spend much of their time hiring developers who can envision solutions which can be implemented algorithmically. Code and algorithms which scale poorly are seen as undesirable and inefficient. Many of the most groundbreaking infrastructural developments in Big Tech have been those which increase scalability, such as Google File System (and subsequently the MapReduce computing schema) and distributed and federated machine learning models,” the paper reads.

Hanna and Park also characterize scale thinking as shortsighted because it requires companies to treat resources and people as interchangeable units and encourages the datafication of users in order to “find ways to rationalize the individual into legible data points.” This approach can lead to systems that are not made to serve everyone equally and that negatively impact the lives of those who fall outside their scaled solutions.

The paper also notes that scale thinking is an inefficient way to increase hiring or retention of employees from diverse backgrounds. Since the deaths of Black Americans like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd led to calls for racial justice earlier this year, a number of major tech companies have recommitted to diversity goals, but for years now progress has been virtually undetectable. Examples in the paper include a tendency to focus on bias workshops or other inclusion metrics rather than the experiences of marginalized people within the company.

Rather than making scale a company’s North Star, the authors suggest approaches like “mutual aid,” in which businesses adopt an interdependent model and take responsibility for meeting the direct material needs of individuals. The idea of mutual aid arose in part from the kinds of support systems that sprung up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“While scale thinking emphasizes abstraction and modularity, mutual aid networks encourage concretization and connection,” the paper reads. “While mutual aid is not the only framework through which we can consider a move away from scale thinking-based collaborative work arrangements, we find it to be a fruitful one to theorize and pursue.”

In addition to exploring mutual aid, the paper encourages developers to ask questions about any system they create, such as whether it legitimizes or expands social systems people are trying to dismantle, whether it encourages broad participation, and whether it centralizes power or distributes power among developers and users.

Recommendations are in line with a range of ethically centered technology models proposed by members of the AI community in recent months. Other approaches include the idea of anticolonial AI, which rejects algorithmic oppression and data colonization, queering machine learning, data feminism, and building AI based on the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which focuses on the interconnectedness of people and the natural world.

There’s also “Good Intentions, Bad Inventions,” a Data & Society primer published earlier this month that attempts to dispel common myths about the best ways to build technology and improve user well-being.

Titled “Against Scale: Provocations and Resistances to Scale Thinking,” the paper was highlighted this week at a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conference workshop. Before writing critically about scale, Hanna and colleagues at Google published a paper in late 2019 that argues the algorithmic fairness community should look to critical race theory as a way to interrogate AI systems and their impact on human lives.


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AI Weekly: Constructive ways to take power back from Big Tech

October 23, 2020   Big Data
 AI Weekly: Constructive ways to take power back from Big Tech

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Facebook launched an independent oversight board and recommitted to privacy reforms this week, but after years of promises made and broken, nobody seems convinced that real change is afoot. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to decide whether to sue Facebook soon, sources told the New York Times, following a $ 5 billion fine last year.

In other investigations, the Department of Justice filed suit against Google this week, accusing the Alphabet company of maintaining multiple monopolies through exclusive agreements, collection of personal data, and artificial intelligence. News also broke this week that Google’s AI will play a role in creating a virtual border wall.

What you see in each instance is a powerful company insistent that it can regulate itself as government regulators appear to reach the opposite conclusion.

If Big Tech’s machinations weren’t enough, this week there was also news of a Telegram bot that undresses women and girls; AI being used to add or change the emotion of people’s faces in photos; and Clearview AI, a company being investigated in multiple countries, allegedly planning to introduce features for police to more responsibly use its facial recognition services. Oh, right, and there’s a presidential election campaign happening.

It’s all enough to make people reach the conclusion that they’re helpless. But that’s an illusion, one that Prince Harry, Duchess Meghan Markle, Algorithms of Oppression author Dr. Safiya Noble, and Center for Humane Technology director Tristan Harris attempted to dissect earlier this week in a talk hosted by Time. Dr. Noble began by acknowledging that AI systems in social media can pick up, amplify, and deepen existing systems of inequality like racism or sexism.

“Those things don’t necessarily start in Silicon Valley, but I think there’s really little regard for that when companies are looking at maximizing the bottom line through engagement at all costs, it actually has a disproportionate harm and cost to vulnerable people. These are things we’ve been studying for more than 20 years, and I think they’re really important to bring out this kind of profit imperative that really thrives off of harm,” Noble said.

As Markle pointed out during the conversation, the majority of extremists in Facebook groups got there because Facebook’s recommendation algorithm suggested they join those groups.

To act, Noble said pay attention to public policy and regulation. Both are crucial to conversations about how businesses operate.

“I think one of the most important things people can do is to vote for policies and people that are aware of what’s happening and who are able to truly intervene because we’re born into the systems that were born into,” she said. “If you ask my parents what it was like being born before the Civil Rights Act was passed, they had a qualitatively different life experience than I have. So I think part of what we have to do is understand the way that policy truly shapes the environment.”

When it comes to misinformation, Noble said people would be wise to advocate in favor of sufficient funding for what she called “counterweights” like schools, libraries, universities, and public media, which she said have been negatively impacted by Big Tech companies.

“When you have a sector like the tech sector that is so extractive — it doesn’t pay taxes, it offshores its profits, it defunds the democratic educational counterweights — those are the places where we really need to intervene. That’s where we make systemic long-term change, is to reintroduce funding and resources back into those spaces,” she said.

Forms of accountability make up one of five values found in many AI ethics principles. During the talk, Tristan Harris emphasized the need for systemic accountability and transparency in Big Tech companies so the public can better understand the scope of problems. For example, Facebook could form a board for the public to report harms; then Facebook can produce quarterly reports on progress toward removing those harms.

For Google, one way to increase transparency could be to release more information about AI ethics principle review requests made by Google employees. A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat that Google does not share this information publicly, beyond some examples. Getting that data on a quarterly basis might reveal more about the politics of Googlers than anything else, but I’d sure like to know if Google employees have reservations about the company increasing surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border or which controversial projects attract the most objections at one of the most powerful AI companies on Earth.

Since Harris and others released The Social Dilemma on Netflix about a month ago, a number of people criticized the documentary for failing to include the voices of women, particularly Black women like Dr. Noble, who have spent years assessing issues undergirding The Social Dilemma, such as how algorithms can automate harm. That being said, it was a pleasure to see Harris and Noble speak together about how Big Tech can build more equitable algorithms and a more inclusive digital world.

For a breakdown of what The Social Dilemma misses, you can read this interview with Meredith Whittaker, which took place this week at a virtual conference. But she also contributes to the heartening conversation about solutions. One helpful piece of advice from Whittaker: Dismiss the idea that the algorithms are superhuman or superior technology. Technology isn’t infallible, and Big Tech isn’t magical. Rather, the grip large tech companies have on people’s lives is a reflection of the material power of large corporations.

“I think that ignores the fact that a lot of this isn’t actually the product of innovation. It’s the product of a significant concentration of power and resources. It’s not progress. It’s the fact that we all are now, more or less, conscripted to carry phones as part of interacting in our daily work lives, our social lives, and being part of the world around us,” Whittaker said. “I think this ultimately perpetuates a myth that these companies themselves tell, that this technology is superhuman, that it’s capable of things like hacking into our lizard brains and completely taking over our subjectivities. I think it also paints a picture that this technology is somehow impossible to resist, that we can’t push back against it, that we can’t organize against it.”

Whittaker, a former Google employee who helped organize a walkout at Google offices worldwide in 2018, also finds workers organizing within companies to be an effective solution. She encouraged employees to recognize methods that have proven effective in recent years, like whistleblowing to inform the public and regulators. Volunteerism and voting, she said, may not be enough.

“We now have tools in our toolbox across tech, like the walkout, a number of Facebook workers who have whistleblown and written their stories as they leave, that are becoming common sense,” she said.

In addition to understanding how power shapes perceptions of AI, Whittaker encourages people to try to better understand how AI influences our lives today. Amid so many other things this week, it might have been easy to miss, but the group AIandYou.org, which wants to help people understand how AI impacts their daily lives, dropped its first introductory video with Spelman College computer science professor Dr. Brandeis Marshall and actress Eva Longoria.

The COVID-19 pandemic, a historic economic recession, calls for racial justice, and the consequences of climate change have made this year challenging, but one positive outcome is that these events have led a lot of people to question their priorities and how each of us can make a difference.

The idea that tech companies can regulate themselves appears to some degree to have dissolved. Institutions are taking steps now to reduce Big Tech’s power, but even with Congress, the FTC, and the Department of Justice — the three main levers of antitrust — now acting to try to rein in the power of Big Tech companies, I don’t know a lot of people who are confident the government will be able to do so. Tech policy advocates and experts, for example, openly question whether factions Congress can muster the political will to bring lasting, effective change.

Whatever happens in the election or with antitrust enforcement, you don’t have to feel helpless. If you want change, people at the heart of the matter believe it will require, among other things, imagination, engagement with tech policy, and a better understanding of how algorithms impact our lives in order to wrangle powered interests and build a better world for ourselves and future generations.

As Whittaker, Noble, and the leader of the antitrust investigation in Congress have said, the power possessed by Big Tech can seem insurmountable, but if people get engaged, there are real reasons to hope for change.

For AI coverage, send news tips to Khari Johnson and Kyle Wiggers and AI editor Seth Colaner — and be sure to subscribe to the AI Weekly newsletter and bookmark our AI Channel.

Thanks for reading,

Khari Johnson

Senior AI Staff Writer


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Tech Insider Update Features Latest Changes to Microsoft Teams that Support Collaboration and CRM Activities

October 10, 2020   CRM News and Info
crmnav Tech Insider Update Features Latest Changes to Microsoft Teams that Support Collaboration and CRM Activities

In today’s business landscape that has an increasing amount of salespeople working remotely, it is more important than ever that organizations have a collaboration platform in place that complements and supports CRM sales activities.

Interested in learning how the latest updates to Microsoft Teams improves collaboration and shared information for sales, service and the entire organization? The August 2020 Tech Insider Update from JourneyTEAM previews the most important releases, updates and changes that promote the effective collaboration your organization needs to close more deals.

The updates to Microsoft Teams include task management capabilities with a new Tasks app, Together Mode in video conferencing, integrated Yammer Communities and Lists apps.

Microsoft Teams

Watch the Teams update video here.

The new Tasks app in Teams merges individual tasks from Microsoft To Do and team tasks from Microsoft Planner for complete task management. The Tasks app is now available in desktop, web and mobile experiences. Guest users will be limited only to mobile and not be able to see it on the desktop version.

Together Mode enables more engaging meetings for remote workers that may be suffering from “meeting fatigue.” This feature places video call participants in a virtual space that make it appear as though they are in the same environment, like an auditorium, sitting side-by-side. In this view, Together Mode also helps presenters better gauge audience reactions.

Yammer App Integrated with Teams

Watch the Yammer and Teams update here.

The Yammer Communities app, an enterprise social networking platform that connects and engages employees through shared communication, has been brought to the Teams experience making it an even greater hub for operations and communications across the organization.

Lists App Integrated with Teams

The Microsoft Lists app helps organizations track and organize work simply, and now organizations can create lists directly within Teams with the Lists App integration that is now generally available. The Lists app will be available in individual Channels as a tab. Users that want to track a list can click the “+” button next to tabs, search for the Lists app in the tab gallery, and easily add it.

All the standard features that are available for Lists in SharePoint web are also now accessible in the Lists app for Teams, which includes the three main views – grid, gallery, and calendar, as well as custom. Users can create lists or pick from eight standard templates.

A standalone Microsoft Lists app for iOS is anticipated for Q4 this year.

SEE THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

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Black tech organizations grow amid calls for racial justice

September 19, 2020   Big Data

Automation and Jobs

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Amazon applied science manager Dr. Nashlie Sephus has lived in New York City, Atlanta, Silicon Valley, and Seoul while pursuing her education and work in machine learning. She knows the look of a community that’s thriving from technology and innovation, but she didn’t see that growth happening in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. That’s why last week she concluded an 18-month process by signing contracts to secure 12 acres of land that will be home to the Jackson Tech District.

The Bean Path, a nonprofit organization created by Sephus, will operate a maker and innovation space on the land. There will also be restaurants and residential lofts spread across eight buildings, all located near the historically Black Jackson State University.

The Bean Path’s expansion in Jackson, a city with one of the highest African-American populations per capita of any city in the U.S., is the latest example of a Black tech organization building community amid ongoing conversations about racial injustice. This growth comes as tech companies have publicly committed to diverse hiring practices after years of little to no progress while releasing statements that mention race but demand no action from people who benefit from racism and white supremacy.

Sephus told VentureBeat in an interview earlier this year she hopes the demands for racial justice that inspired the biggest protests in U.S. history will lead hiring managers who work with engineers and scientists to take genuine steps to diversify their teams.

The Bean Path was founded in 2018 to seed technical expertise in Mississippi and do things like advise startups on their technical roadmaps. It aims to include people who haven’t worked in tech or who didn’t go to a prestigious college or attend college. The Bean Path’s in-person events initially focused on Jackson, with office hours held in local libraries. Virtual office hours made necessary by COVID-19 mean The Bean Path now works with people across the U.S. Once the Jackson Tech District opens, the group plans to host co-development sessions and conferences with other organizations. Sephus is also working with a group to open KITTLabs for Black developers in Atlanta this fall.

Above: A rendering of the Jackson Tech District

Sephus came to Amazon in 2018 following the acquisition of Partpic, where she served as CTO. In an interview with VentureBeat earlier this year, Sephus said she’s happy if her accomplishments inspire young professionals to enter the field or apply to Amazon, but she’s looking forward to the day when being a Black female machine learning scientist working at Amazon is not a rarity.

“I’m not proud at all when I say that I am one of the only or very few; it’s literally just a reminder to people who are in charge of these decisions that this is the reality,” she said. “I think that change with these companies and these types of technologies have to be pressured from the outside, as well as from the inside. And so as someone who is on the inside, I know firsthand what it takes to make change — it takes a lot. And so I’m dedicated to keep fighting for what I believe in. Again, I just encourage folks to do the same. I think we’re headed in the right direction, but it’s going to take a lot more stakeholders to come together and hash out some of these issues.”

In June, Sephus joined more than 100 Black tech professionals and 100 allies in signing a public letter released about a week after George Floyd’s death. The letter was published by Black in Computing, a group that maintains “when one of us is traumatized as a result of inequity and racism, all of us are traumatized.” The letter calls the tech industry “oblivious, complicit, or indifferent” to the discrimination Black technologists encounter and calls for a series of actions, like the creation of unbiased working environments that allow people of all backgrounds to prosper.

“We know that the advances of computing are transforming the way we all live, work, and learn. We also know that we cannot ask for equal opportunity for anyone without demanding equal opportunity for everyone. We know that in the same way computing can be used to stack the deck against Black people, it can also be used to stack the deck against anyone,” the letter reads.

Black in Robotics held its first official meeting last Friday to gather ideas from initial members, but the group began to take shape in June after a panel conversation about race and robotics held by Silicon Valley Robotics.

In opening remarks, Georgia Tech professor Dr. Ayanna Howard said that systemic racism in the tech industry is a problem, but as AI and robotics become more common, systematic bias and other negative aspects of technology will impact the rest of the world unless we can change course.

“If we do it right, it means that we leave the world a better place. And I think as a roboticist, this is the reason why I still remain a roboticist, still build my robots and program them and work with people, is because I truly believe that as roboticists we can impact the world and change it,” Howard said.

Maynard Holliday is a co-organizer of Black in Robotics and wrote the group’s mission statement. His credentials include working with robots deployed to help contain radioactive fallout at Chernobyl. A senior engineer at the RAND Corporation, he currently works with federally funded research and development centers for the military. He said he knows from his long experience in the industry that the problem is bias in hiring, not pipeline issues.

“I’ve been working 30+ years in the field and have been the only person of color in almost every situation, whether it be in industry or in my role at the Pentagon in the Obama administration, at national labs,” Holliday told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “I’m at the point of my career where I’m at the end of it and hopefully cruising to retirement, but I want to see the community flourish.”

Black in Robotics is just getting started, but at launch the organization is taking a two-pronged approach. One part of the organization is devoted to building community among Black roboticists through mentorship and outreach to Black people who want to become roboticists, as well as networking at robotics conferences and job or internship listings for college students. The other part of the organization is aimed at companies that want to build more diverse organizations or act as allies to Black roboticists. That area will provide resources, like a directory of Black roboticists and a list of research by Black roboticists for citation by colleagues or for academics to add to a computer science syllabus.

Following the meeting last week, Black in Robotics is currently forming mentorship, engagement, and industry committees with plans to roll out formal programs later this year, Holliday said.

In another development, African AI researchers have written a number of works in recent months about creating AI in the spirit of anticolonialism AI and Ubuntu, the African philosophy of interdependence.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

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New CRM, Microsoft Cloud, & Office 365 Updates – Tech Insider Update

September 16, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

In August, JourneyTEAM hosted the Q3 Tech Insider Update webinar that introduced the latest Microsoft releases, updates, and changes, including those to Microsoft Cloud and Office 365. Learn about the updates to CRM, Exchange Online, Azure Active Directory, and Intune – now Microsoft Unified Endpoint Management.

Exchange Online

  • Modern Authentication
  • Mailbox Import/Export
  • Outlook App Updates
  • Team Calendar Access for On-premises Clients

Exchange Online PowerShell V2 cmdlets (now in GA) support modern authentication and unattended scripts for more secure user authorization. The V2 cmdlets, which were previously only available in preview mode, are more reliable and efficient than their predecessors and 4-8x faster. Note that the V1 cmdlets will be retired in the second half of 2021. A modern authentication UI is now available in Office 365 Admin Center under “Settings” that allows easy enabling/disabling of authentication for various services and components.

Easily recover deleted mailbox items through a simple UI in the Office 365 Admin Center. Previously this feature was available only through PowerShell. This feature requires that “Mailbox Import Export” RBAC role for accounts is enabled.

Higher security controls on corporate data access on mobile devices: This includes controls on conditional access, improved security for Android 10 devices, and enforcing greater password complexity requirements. In line with your organizational policies, you can determine the level of password complexity, which is encouraged as you review current password policies. Updates to the app also include the ability to book workspaces in both Android and Mac.

Calendars are now viewable in Teams in the cloud and Exchange on-premises. A couple easy steps is all it takes to enable this to work.

Azure AD (Active Directory)

  • Workday and Azure AD Integration
  • Azure AD Graph API Updates
  • Access Reviews for Specific Groups and Users
  • Alternate Login
  • Support for Remote Desktop Services Web Client
  • Azure AD Sign-ins Portal: https://mysignins.microsoft.com

Great news if your organization uses Workday for HR: updates to the Workday to Azure AD integration now promote greater efficiency in the onboarding and offboarding processes. Thanks to the updates to this powerful integration, HR departments that use Workday as a master into Azure AD can reduce its dependency on IT for provisioning and deprovisioning. They will also have access to emails, usernames, and phone numbers that come directly from AD.

The integration can now also automate the creation or disabling of an account in Azure AD. For example, if the hiring process is rescinded for any reason, it will disable account creation in Azure AD. Further, new AD accounts will only be created after the “New Hire” process is completed.

Announcement: If your current setup talks to the Azure AD graph (not the Microsoft Graph for all Office 365 services), please note that security updates and support will stop on June 30, 2022. Organizations using Azure AD graph applications are advised to migrate to Microsoft Graph now.

Azure AD access reviews can now be added to specific groups and users, which is a great addition to your organization’s cloud governance and identity management initiatives. This enables control and specific targeting of what users can access. Some automation capabilities for this are available through Microsoft Graph (beta).

Alternate Login, now available in public preview on Azure, allows users to log in using their email address (instead of limited to username only), even if the email address and username are different. If your organization has usernames that are different than users’ primary email addresses, this allows authentication to Azure without having to change a UPN or username to match the email address.

Updates to Remote Desktop: Azure Ad Proxy allows publishing of Remote Desktop Services through the web with additional security. This works if Ad Proxy is later than version 1.5.1975.0.

Microsoft Intune – Now Named Microsoft Unified Endpoint Management

  • Autopilot for Azure AD
  • Hybrid Join Scenarios – No VPN Needed!

Microsoft recently rolled out the autopilot feature for Azure AD hybrid join scenarios. Administrators can domain join a Windows 10 computer when that computer is off the corporate network. This allows a hands-off experience for IT where they do not have to touch the computer at any point. The device is joined to traditional AD on-prem with no VPN required. This is a particularly important new feature for organizations that have been interested in autopilot but are not ready to do Azure AD joining for Windows 10 devices and still need group policies and traditional on-prem models.

See Full Article Here

The webinar is available online so that organizations get the details on what’s new and learn how these updates may affect their IT and cybersecurity governance and risk management initiatives. Watch the full JourneyTEAM Q3 2020 Tech Insider Update HERE.

Learn about the latest updates from Microsoft and get started on a path to better technology solutions at your organization with the help of JourneyTEAM

Want to learn more about the latest updates and releases to other Microsoft technologies relevant to your organization? Check out JourneyTEAM’s Tech Insider Update playlist, where you can browse the most recent updates by Microsoft product.

In addition to Microsoft Cloud, the Q3 Insider Update highlights changes to Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM), Power Platform Automate and Power Apps, Dynamics 365 Business Central (ERP), and Power BI and Business Analytics.

Get Started with JourneyTEAM

As a Microsoft Gold Partner with six gold competencies, JourneyTEAM has a proven track record with successful Microsoft technology implementations. Our experts are here to answer your questions about the latest updates from Microsoft and we can get you started on the path to better technology solutions. Contact JourneyTEAM today!


Josh Buahin – SR. Developer & Architect | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

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Microsoft Tech Update: New Features & More in August 2020

August 20, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

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Join JourneyTEAM’s Tech Insider Update for Business Strategies and Insider Tips & Tricks | August 6th

July 29, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

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